Awake is one of those movies that I'm slightly ambivalent about. The movie was quite... weird. Ordinarily, I would give it 2 stars for acting. I gave it 3 stars because I found the plot had quite some twists to it that I was not expecting.

As I started the movie, I knew it was a story about a guy who was Awake on the operating table. But the movie starts out with a doctor talking about how he lost someone on the operating table. ??? I started to wonder about the movie from the start... if the main character dies at the end of the movie, why would it matter whether he was awake or not? It seems a little anticlimactic to let the guy live through surgery but die at the end.

Clay Beresford (Hayden Christensen) is a man that seems to have it all. He's rich, has a gorgeous girlfriend, Sam (Jessica Alba), and has a lot of power within the corporate world.

As he leaves Sam's house, she says something about wanting a happily ever after. Then he comes home and kisses a sleeping lady lying in bed on the cheek.

For the next 5 minutes of watching the movie, I'm puzzled by who is who in the movie. Eventually I figure out that the lady in the bed is Clay's mom (Lena Olin) and that she seems to be a control freak of a mom that won't let her son have a life of his own. He even has to hide the fact that he is engaged to Sam.

While I am sorting this out, we find out that Clay has a bad heart. He has a rare blood type, so even with all that money, it is still taking a long time to find a donor. Clay and his mom are at odds with each other over who should perform the operation once a heart becomes available. The controlling mom prefers that he let a world-renowned surgeon operate on him, but Clay wants to have his friend, who just happens to have 4 malpractice suits against him, to perform the operation.

After Clay starts to assert some control over his life, he ends up on the operating table and finds himself awake and feeling everything. This part left me a little squeamish, as it would many people. Although the actor can't move, he is voicing his thoughts in the movie.

At this point, the movie starts getting really weird as the plot unfolds. He tries to put his focus on Sam as they perform surgery. This doesn't seem realistic. If someone was cutting into me, I don't think that I would be able to focus on anything else, no matter how hard I tried. As I listened to his thoughts, they were just not that believable. And this is the downside of the movie.

He also ends up having an out of body experience and has flashbacks that also seem unrealistic. The storyline can be somewhat difficult to follow at times, as the plot jumps from one scene to another.

The plot twist was quite unexpected to me. I'm not saying what it is because that would completely ruin this movie, but I expected something else.

I thought Jessica Alba did a great job playing Sam. Unlike Hayden Christensen, I thought that her character was believable.

If you like Jessica Alba, you'll like that part about this movie. But not even my friend who adores Jessica Alba thought this was a great movie (outside of her being in it). It has this low-budget quality to it, accompanied by creepy piano music. This movie could have been good because the whole premise of the movie is something that would be interesting, but it just wasn't. There are a lot of better movies out there, so unless you have nothing else to watch or just have to see everything that Jessica Alba does, you may want to skip this one.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age